Isabella County took a step Tuesday night towards a future where a police officer is just a text message away.

The county will enter a multi-county consortium to deliver improved Central Dispatch services, and part of that is purchasing equipment that down the road will making it possible for owners of smart phones to send text messages to 911.

Marc Griffis, the county’s emergency management director, said that while that is a big, flashy improvement, the real value in joining the Great Lakes Bay Consortium, is savings offered by purchasing based on economies of scale and modernizing the technology the service operates on.

One of the consortium’s partners is Central Michigan University. The other seven members are counties in mid-Michigan and the Thumb.

Cameron Wassman, a lieutenant with CMU Police, said that partnering made it practical for his department to adopt newer dispatch technologies.

“It’s a big cost savings,” he said after the meeting. Where put into practice elsewhere, the ability to text Central Dispatch is flashy but isn’t used that often. What really makes it worthwhile are the new technologies that make Central Dispatch operations run more smoothly especially when calls overload a county’s ability to handle them during big emergencies.

Griffis pointed to the massive pileup of cars several years ago as a time when so many calls were coming into Isabella County’s Central Dispatch that additional calls were being routed to other counties. Among the other behind-the-scenes benefits, the consortium provides a much larger pool of support from other central dispatch centers and at higher speeds of information transmission.

Griffis briefed the county board of commissioners on the partnership and the opportunities the consortium offered the county. After his presentation, county administrator Margaret McAvoy credited Griffis with doing the legwork on behalf of the county.

Joining the consortium was an important hurdle to modernizing Central Dispatch services. The next step is the procurement of equipment and software.

Once all that is up and running, Griffis said they have to start getting every phone carrier on board. Because there are more than 100 of them, that could take some time.